ALBUM REVIEW: King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard – Nonagon Infinity

King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard are a dreamy band. Not in the way that your mum thought Johnny Depp was dreamy in A Nightmare On Elm Street, but also kind of exactly like that. The Melbourne born band have been pulling absolute crackers of albums out their collective arse regularly since 2012, with the stand out, in my eyes, being 2014’s I’m In Your Mind Fuzz.

Then on their last release, Paper Mache Dream Balloon in 2015, they went off track and properly owned “dreamy”. That album probably would have went even better accompanying Radiohead’s video for Burn The Witch than Burn The Witch did. It was an absolute delight to listen to.

In April they released Nonagon Infinity, which jumps straight back into their guitar heavy, fuzzed to fuck sound that I’m In Your Mind Fuzz was so great for. I think King Gizzard & Co. are so great mainly because they make heavy rock music that you can actually dance to, like Thee Oh Sees but groovier. Nonagon Infinity is a fast paced trip repeating over and over again, literally: instructions on the band’s Bandcamp page state “Play it on infinite loop”.

The start of the album, the first time you hear it, sets the tone well, gets you hyped, does all the things it should do, but when it comes round for the second time, straight after you’ve finished listening to the album, you realise that this album never has to end, the final notes lead directly back into the first.

Nonagon (a nine sided shape) Infinity (I’m not defining that.) is a never ending album. This is, essentially, vinyl’s locked groove, just for MP3s. The first single they released, Gamma Knife, lets you know right off the bat that they fit right into the sound I’m In Your Mind Fuzz was rich with, the back and forth of every riff and the, not to establish a theme, dreamy lyrics flow with such fervor that it’s clear that this ferocious jive is right in their territory.

Once Evil Death Roll starts, towards the end of the album, you’ll be very clear on the sort of music King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard Ltd. want to make, and it should be equally as clear that they’re pretty good at it. The song starts slow, then its distorted riff gets faster and starts rolling into itself as it’s repeated over the vocals.

Any song that’s 7 minutes long has to evolve so as not to be stale, so when the song has transitioned into a fuzzy, twangy bridge towards the end, it gets a brand new lease of life when the band all lose their shit at once after the drums make themselves known.

Soft drumming and blaring harmonicas litter the LP throughout, and none of it feels out of place. The lyrics of the album are hypnotically screamed half-sentences, that don’t really make any sense but they don’t really need to, the sound they all make together speaks for itself. Like I say, it’s dreamy.